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John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

As many of you know, I’ve long been an advocate for the specialty specific EHR. There are just tremendous advantages in having an EHR that’s focused only on your specialty. Then, you don’t get things like child growth charts cluttering your EHR when you don’t see any children. Or taken the other way, you have child growth charts that are designed specifically for a pediatrician. This can be applied across pretty much every industry.

The reason that many organizations don’t go with a specialty specific EHR is usually because they’re a large multi specialty organization. These organizations don’t want to have 30 different EHR vendors that they have to support. Therefore, in their RFP they basically exclude specialty specific EHR vendors from their EHR selection process.

I understand from an IT support perspective and EHR implementation perspective how having 30 different EHR implementation would be a major challenge. However, it’s also a challenge to try and get one EHR vendor to work for 30+ specialties as well. Plus, the long term consequence is physician and other EHR user dissatisfaction using an EHR that wasn’t designed for their specialty. The real decision these organizations are making is whether they want to put the burden on the IT staff (ie. supporting multiple EHRs) or whether they want to put the burden on the doctors (ie. using an EHR that doesn’t meet their needs). In large organizations, it seems that they’re making the decision to put the burden on the doctors as opposed to the IT staff. Although, I don’t think many organizations realize that this is the choice they’re making.

Specialty EHR vendor, gMed, recenlty put out a whitepaper which does an analysis and a kind of case study on the differences between a integrated GI practice and a non-integrated GI practice. In this case, they’re talking about an EHR that’s integrated with an ambulatory surgery center and one that’s not. That’s a big deal for a specialty like GI. You can download the free whitepaper to get all the juicy details and differences between an integrated GI practice and one that’s not.

I’ve been seeing more and more doctors starting to talk about their displeasure with their EHR. I think much of that displeasure comes thanks to meaningful use and reimbursement requirements, but I also think that many are suffering under an EHR that really doesn’t understand their specialty. From my experience those EHR vendors that claim to support every specialty, that usually consists of one support rep for that specialty and a few months programming sprint to try and provide something special for that specialty. That’s very different than a whole team of developers and every customer support person at the company devoted to a specialty.

I’m not saying that an EHR can’t do more than one specialty, but doing 5 somewhat related specialties is still very different than trying to do the 40+ medical specialties with one interface. One challenge with the best of breed approach is that there are some specialties which don’t have an EHR that’s focused just on them. In that case, you may have to use the every specialty EHR.

What’s clear to me is that most large multi specialty organizations are choosing the all-in-one EHR systems in their offices. I wonder if force feeding an EHR into a specialty where it doesn’t fit is going to eventually lead to a physician revolt back to specialty specific EHRs. Physician dissatisfaction, liability issues, and improved interoperability could make the best of breed approach much more attractive to even the large organizations. Even if it means they back into a best of breed approach after trying the one-size-fits all approach to EHR.

I’ll be interested to watch this dynamic playing out. Plus, you have the specialty doctors coming together in mega groups in order to combat against this as well. What do you think is going to happen with specialty EHR? Should organizations be doing a best of breed approach or the one-size-fits all EHR? What are the consequences (good and bad) of either direction?

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

When I was speaking at the gMed user conference, I learned about many of the users who participated on a GI focused online forum for gMed users. Essentially it’s an independent user group for gMed EHR users. Although, with so many GI doctors in one place, you can be sure there are all sorts of focused discussions that would be of interest to gastroenterology doctors.

Of course, there are a lot of other online forums that are similar to the GI forum. For example, Amazing Charts has a really active user forum. The open source EHR, OpenEMR also has a forum. I’m sure there are a lot more. I’d love to hear about other EHR forums you know about in the comments.

Many people probably don’t know that I built up much of my EMR knowledge participating in the now defunct EMR Update. It was a fantastic way for me to learn and share my knowledge. I’m sure that those who participate in the various EMR forums above get the same benefit. Although, it’s probably even more valuable since the forums above are all on the same EHR software.

I can’t tell you how valuable it is for a clinic to be able to turn to other users when they run into trouble. One of the best ways to optimize your EHR is to interact and exchange ideas with other end users. That’s why I’ve started creating a list of EHR user conferences as well. However, for those who can’t take the time off to go to a user conference, an online discussion forum is a great alternative. I’m surprised that more EHR vendors don’t create these types of forums.

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